The present invention relates to a Method for forwarding packets according to the preamble of claim 1, the Packet forwarding system according to the preamble of claim 6, and classification device according to the preamble of claim 8.
Such a Method for forwarding packets of a plurality of multimedia streams and a related system is already known in the art, e.g. from “U.S. Pat. No. 6,728,775”. Therein, is disclosed that with layered coding of multimedia streams such as video streams, the multimedia stream is divided into sub-bit-streams, which have a reduced bit-rate. Typically there will be a base layer further referred to as multimedia base-stream and one or two enhancement layers, further referred to as multimedia enhancement streams The basic layer contains the minimum amount of data to decode the video stream and suitable for providing a basic multimedia quality to an end-user further referred to as multimedia endpoint. One or more enhancement layers are added to enhance the video quality provisioning the end-user with information for decoding and viewing the multimedia stream with an improved multimedia quality.
With primary traffic management, these enhancement bit-streams are classified to be less important. In addition routers and switches, further referred to as network elements of the communication network may react to temporary network congestion by dropping the less important packets from the stream. The less important packets from the stream, are the packets of the respective first and further enhancement bit-streams where the first enhancements stream is ranked higher in priority than a further enhancement stream.
Disadvantageously, from the network's perspective, the scheme of traffic management method for packet classifying is inefficient for the overall user experience. As a consequence the network will in case of congestion randomly drop the less important multimedia stream packets of all of the multimedia streams meaning that all end-users experience a degraded service.